The last of 65 turbines is turning off Rhode Island after a year-long halt

The final turbine at Revolution Wind locked into place off the Rhode Island coast on September 18, 2026, closing out construction on an offshore wind farm that spent much of the past thirteen months fighting off federal orders to stop working. Rhode Island’s governor marked the moment as proof that a project many assumed was dead would still reach the finish line.

The wind farm has been feeding partial power into the New England grid since March, even as crews kept working through two separate federally ordered halts. With every turbine now standing in the water, the project’s owners expect it to reach full output before the year is out.

Two orders from Washington, thirteen months apart

The disruption behind that timeline traces to a single federal agency. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s public case file on Revolution Wind shows its acting director ordered the project’s owner to halt all activity on August 22, 2025, citing unspecified national-security concerns, then issued a second order on December 22, 2025, suspending the project for another 90 days as part of a broader pause covering five East Coast wind farms.

The first order didn’t survive contact with the courts. A federal judge sided with the developers and with the states of Rhode Island and Connecticut, and construction resumed within weeks of the August halt. The reprieve didn’t last long: by December, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum was announcing a fresh suspension, framing it as a matter of homeland defense rather than energy policy.

“The prime duty of the United States government is to protect the American people,” Burgum said in the statement announcing the December pause, pointing to what he called emerging risks tied to the turbines’ proximity to East Coast population centers. Offshore construction was already more than 80% complete at the time, and more than 100 workers at Connecticut’s State Pier kept staging turbine blades and tower components even as the legal fight played out. Ørsted had told the court that the first stop-work order alone was costing the project more than $2 million a day, and that canceling it outright would add over $1 billion in expenses.

Ørsted and Skyborn’s turbines start feeding two grids

Revolution Wind is a joint venture between the Danish energy company Ørsted and Skyborn Renewables, a German offshore developer that bought a 50 percent stake in the project from Connecticut utility Eversource in 2024. The Boston Globe reported the completed farm is expected to reach its full commercial operation by the end of 2026, delivering power to both Rhode Island and Connecticut ratepayers as the region deals with rising electricity costs. The same report placed Revolution Wind alongside two other finished East Coast projects: Vineyard Wind 1, south of Martha’s Vineyard, which installed 62 turbines capable of serving more than 400,000 homes and businesses, and the smaller South Fork Wind, which can generate 132 megawatts for more than 70,000 homes near Block Island.

Every one of the 65 turbines is now installed, and the project is expected to supply enough electricity for roughly 350,000 New England homes and businesses once it reaches full capacity, according to the local report that first confirmed the milestone from the site of the final turbine’s installation. That figure covers both states served by the project, not Rhode Island alone.

Governor Dan McKee framed the completion as validation of the state’s decision to keep fighting for the project through two rounds of federal interference. In his written statement marking the milestone, McKee said the project means “more energy produced in our own backyard, good-paying union jobs, and a stronger, more reliable energy supply for Rhode Island families and businesses.”

What advocates and rivals in the industry say happens next

Outside groups treated the completion as a bellwether for an industry the Trump administration has spent the better part of two years trying to shrink. Hillary Bright, executive director of the offshore wind advocacy group Turn Forward, called the milestone “an important milestone for Rhode Island, Connecticut, and the broader New England region” in a statement circulated the same day construction wrapped, adding that the region needs generation that can “strengthen reliability, diversify the power supply, and provide greater certainty for consumers.”

Revolution Wind now joins South Fork Wind, off New York, and Vineyard Wind 1, off Martha’s Vineyard, as the third large-scale U.S. offshore project to finish construction, while two others, Empire Wind and Sunrise Wind, remain under development and are targeting 2027. Each of the finished projects has weathered its own version of the same fight: stop-work orders issued, then reversed in federal court, while construction crews kept building through the uncertainty.

Whether Revolution Wind’s turbines keep spinning without further interruption now depends less on engineering than on politics. The 90-day suspension issued in December has already expired without derailing construction, but the underlying dispute over whether offshore turbines pose a genuine national-security risk, a claim federal officials have not yet backed with public evidence, remains unresolved in court even as the machines themselves start generating power at scale.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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